Ruby HTTP Client

SYNOPSIS

Patron is a Ruby HTTP client library based on libcurl. It does not try to expose the full "power" (read complexity) of libcurl but instead tries to provide a sane API while taking advantage of libcurl under the hood.

USAGE

Usage is very simple. First, you instantiate a Session object. You can set a few default options on the Session instance that will be used by all subsequent requests:

sess = Patron::Session.new
sess.timeout = 10
sess.base_url = "http://myserver.com:9900"
sess.headers['User-Agent'] = 'myapp/1.0'

You can set options with a hash in the constructor:

sess = Patron::Session.new({ :timeout => 10,
                             :base_url => 'http://myserver.com:9900',
                             :headers => {'User-Agent' => 'myapp/1.0'} } )

Or the set options in a block:

sess = Patron::Session.new do |patron|
    patron.timeout = 10
    patron.base_url = 'http://myserver.com:9900'
    patron.headers = {'User-Agent' => 'myapp/1.0'}
end

Output debug log:

sess.enable_debug "/tmp/patron.debug"

The Session is used to make HTTP requests.

resp = sess.get("/foo/bar")

Requests return a Response object:

if resp.status < 400
  puts resp.body
end

The GET, HEAD, PUT, POST and DELETE operations are all supported.

sess.put("/foo/baz", "some data")
sess.delete("/foo/baz")

You can ship custom headers with a single request:

sess.post("/foo/stuff", "some data", {"Content-Type" => "text/plain"})

That is pretty much all there is to it.

REQUIREMENTS

You need a recent version of libcurl in order to install this gem. On MacOS X the provided libcurl is sufficient. You will have to install the libcurl development packages on Debian or Ubuntu. Other Linux systems are probably similar. Windows users are on your own. Good luck with that.

INSTALL

sudo gem install patron

Copyright (c) 2008 The Hive